Thug is a client honeypot that emulates a real web browser, fetches and executes any internal or external JavaScript, follows all redirects, downloadable files just like any browser would do, and collects the results in a mongodb collection. The purpose of this tool is to study, analyse and locate exploit kits and malicious websites. Thug’s analysis can be difficult to navigate or understand and this is where Rumal comes in. Rumal’s function is to be Thug’s GUI, providing users with trees, graphs, maps, tables and intuitive representations of Thug’s data.Read more »

CuckooML is a GSOC 2016 project by Kacper Sokol that aims to deliver the possibility to find similarities between malware samples based on static and dynamic analysis features of binaries submitted to Cuckoo Sandbox. By using anomaly detection techniques, such mechanism is able to cluster and identify new types of malware and can constitute an invaluable tool for security researchers.

It's all about data..

Malware datasets tend to be relatively large and sparse. They are mostly made of categorical and string data, hence there is a strong need for good feature extraction approaches to obtain numerical vectors that can be feed into machine learning algorithms [e.g. Back to the Future: Malware Detection with Temporally Consistent Labels; Miller B., et al.]. Another common problem is concept drift, the continuous variation of malware statistical properties caused by never ending arms race between malware and antivirus developers. Unfortunately, this makes fitting the clusters even harder and requires the chosen approach to be either easy to re-train or be adaptable to the drift, with the latter option being more desirable.Read more »

DigitalOcean, a leading cloud computing platform, announced its support of The Honeynet Project with donation of Web infrastructure and support services. The partnership will allow The Honeynet Project to continue its mission of ongoing research and education surrounding Internet security and risk prevention. “We’re incredibly grateful to DigitalOcean for their support,” said Faiz Shuja, CEO of The Honeynet Project. Read more »

Sometimes (actually, most times) you don’t need advanced deception technology, but rather just a simple tool to answer some simple questions. I was recently in that situation, and needed the answers to the following questions: Read more »

Hi there, my name is Li Yuanchun and I'm glad to introduce DroidBot, a tool to improve the coverage of dynamic analysis. As it is the case for malware targeting the desktop, static and dynamic analysis are also used for detection of Android malware. However, existing static analysis tools such as FlowDroid or DroidSafe lack accuracy because of specific characteristics of the Android framework like ICC (Inter-Component Communication), dynamic loading, alias, etc. While dynamic analysis is more reliable because it executes the target app in a real Android environment and monitors the behaviors during runtime, its effectiveness relays on the amount of code it is able to execute, this is, its *coverage*. Because some malicious behaviors only appear at certain states, the more states covered, the more malicious behaviors detected. The goal of DroidBot is to help achieving a higher coverage in automated dynamic analysis. In particular, DroidBox works like a robot interacting with the target app and tries to trigger as many malicious behaviors as possible. The Android official tool for this kind of analysis used to be Monkey, which behaves similarly by generating pseudo-random streams of user events like clicks,touches, or gestures, as well as a number of system-level events. However, Monkey interacts with an Android app pretty much like its name indicates and lacks any context or semantics of the views (icons, buttons, etc.) in each app. Read more »

What is dpkt?

dpkt is a Python library that helps with "fast, simple packet creation/parsing, with definitions for the basic TCP/IP protocols". It supports a lot of protocols (currently about 63) and has been increasingly used in a lot of network security projects. It is 44x faster than Scapy2, and 5x faster than Impacket3. With Scapy no longer in development, dpkt is the only network creation/parsing library for Python that is active. Read more »

As you may know, Thug is a handy tool for studying exploit kits, as it emulates a real browser complete of a set of plugins like Adobe Reader, Flash and Java. When you feed Thug with the URL of a suspicious web page, it “crawls” it and starts fetching and executing any internal or external JavaScript, following redirects and downloading files just like a browser would do. When Thug encounters some files it cannot analyze by itself (like Flash, Java and PDF), it passes them to external tools. Thug’s results are then collected in a variety of formats, with the default one being a set of collections inside a MongoDB database. Thug works very well but the output can be challenging to navigate, the result often being the ability to only check if the exploit kit’s payload (e.g. an *.exe file) has been downloaded: if not, one may think that the URL is not malicious, or maybe that the exploit kit is dead. That’s where a web GUI would come handy, and that’s exactly what Thug’s Rumal was born for: there’s plenty of information that can be extracted from Thug’s output and that can help a correct analysis to determine the maliciousness of a web page.

Rumal was developed by Tarun Kumar during the Google Summer of Code 2015 program, and its goal is to provide a web GUI for Thug. Read more »